F2P

Yager Development takes its time when making its games. Take a look at Spec Ops: The Line. After years in development hell, the shooter was finally was green lit under the helm of the studio. Full-scale work on that project began in 2007, and over a few ups and downs, it was released to surprising acclaim. Influenced by Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, the effort wasn’t a typical military shooter.

The team handled the project with unexpected subtlety and nuance. It was a shooter that dug deeper and challenged the morality of the genre. It felt like an Sundance flick done in the style of a summer blockbuster. For a follow-up, Yager has set its sights on something bigger, and by bigger, the developer is talking a sci-fi saga full of spaceships the size of small cities. It’s appropriately named Dreadnought.Continue Reading →

Although it’s made a name for itself recently among the PC crowd, Wargaming.net has been a game developer that’s been around for the past 15 years. A studio that originally worked on strategy games, the developer enjoyed a meteoric rise based on the success of World of Tanks.

The free-to-play MMO has caught on with 70 million players, and Wargaming.net is expanding with plans for World of Warships and World of Warplanes. The former is still in development but the latter is close to a release. The flying game been in beta for what seems like forever, but now, World of Warplanes is set to launch globally Nov. 12 and 13.

I had a chance to speak with Gareth Luke, Wargaming.net’s senior producer, about the company’s plans for the future at a recent San Francisco event. He offered details on World of Warplanes, World of Tanks on the Xbox 360 and how the company is going to eventually combine the trilogy of games.

I’ve been following Dragon’s Prophet since GDC, and today, the free-to-play MMO is making its official debut after a long beta. Since I first saw it, the game that has a Pokemon element where you capture and train dragons has under gone a few changes. Here’s a list of upgraded features:

It seems that there’s a new free-to-play MMO coming out every month. They always range the gamut in quality and include everything from top down sprite-based games such asRagnarok Online to dynamic polygonal worlds like Eve Online. It takes a lot to stand out, and Sony Online Entertainment hopes that its upcoming project Dragon’s Prophet will do enough to catch players’ eyes.

I had a chance to check out the Runewaker Entertainment-developed MMO at this year’s GDC and the best way to describe it is that it’s a more visceral World of Warcraft game with a Pokemon element. Players choose from four classes: Guardian who specializes in melee combat, Sorcerer who is your magic user, Ranger who fires off ranged weapons and oracle who is the healer and DPS dealer. Those are your common MMO archetypes.